It is desirable to cover pools, such as swimming pools, for various reasons, such as preventing evaporation and heat loss, and providing solar heating. Conventional pool covers have several shortcomings. Heavy covers are expensive. They are large and bulky and not easily used or stored. Pool covers of light material, such as of bubble pack type, typically cover an entire pool and project over the decking for anchoring the cover and preventing the cover from falling into the pool. Such covers are subject to winds that often lift them so as to dislocate or actually move the covers from the pool areas to other areas, e.g. neighbor's yard. Winds can pull such large light pool covers from under sand bags, and/or steel pipes as are commonly used. Further, any large cover can be dangerous for small children or animals, which can be trapped underneath.
Smaller solar pool heaters of the floating type have been proposed, but none appear to be marketed. The ones proposed have several disadvantages. Many have hard or rigid parts that are dangerous should a person fall into the pool and that make them bulky and difficult to store. Some of the larger ones have large air chambers that would encourage convection and heat loss. The lighter ones would tend to fly away in the wind. In general, they are bulky to store, difficult to deploy, and difficult to retrieve and remove.
Therefore, there it is desirable to have an improved floating pool heater that overcomes shortcomings in the prior art.
Magnets and magnetic fields have been known to treat water. Examples of magnetic treatment devices are disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,951,807 and 4,153,559 in the name of Charles H. Sanderson and U.S. Pat. No. 5,059,296 to Mark Sherman. The magnet is said to condition the water by altering various minerals suspended in the water and to reduce the amount of oxidizer, such as chlorine, required
Therefore, it is further desirable that the improved floating pool heater incorporate magnets for conditioning the water,